Current Legal Issues

MP3 Support

MP3 encoding and decoding support is not included in any Fedora application because MP3 is heavily patented in several regions including the United States. The patent holder is unwilling to give an unrestricted patent grant, as required by the GPL. Other platforms might have paid the royalty and/or included proprietary software. Other Linux distributions not based in a region affected by the patent might ship MP3 decoders/encoders or they might have included proprietary software. However, Fedora cannot and does not include MP3 decoders/encoders in order to serve the goal of providing and supporting only free and open source software that is not restricted by software patents by default.

NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Drivers

The NVIDIA graphics drivers are proprietary, and many kernel developers consider this driver to violate the GPL license of the kernel. Fedora does not include proprietary software.

Fedora Suggests: Consider using a graphics adapter from Intel or any other manufacturer that provides full specifications or source code. Note that NVIDIA adapters will usually work well using the drivers included with Fedora, but accelerated functions (OpenGL) will not be available.

ATI Accelerated Graphics Drivers

The ATI graphics drivers are proprietary and many kernel developers consider this driver to violate the GPL license of the kernel. Fedora does not include proprietary software.

ATI has provided specifications for their recent cards and also released drivers which are expected to support full 3D acceleration in the future. Fedora will include these drivers when they are more functional and robust.

NDISwrapper network driver

NDISwrapper works by bridging Windows drivers into kernel space; many kernel developers consider this to violate the GPL license of the kernel. Furthermore, NDISwrapper does not work with standard kernel features, such as 4K stacks, and exposes the user to binary-only drivers in kernel space that the user cannot modify or fix. Furthermore, NDISwrapper does not work at all without the Windows drivers, which 1) are not redistributable, and therefore cannot be shipped in Fedora, and 2) are not open source, and therefore will not be shipped in Fedora.

Fedora Suggests: Try using the in-kernel drivers that support many common wireless cards, such as Intel or Broadcom wireless adapters.

Real Media (and Player)

Real Media encoding and decoding support is not included in any Fedora application because it is heavily patented in several regions including the United States. The patent holder is unwilling to give an unrestricted patent grant, as required by the GPL. Other platforms might have paid the royalty, or included proprietary software. Other Linux distributions not based in a region affected by the patent might ship Real Media decoders and encoders. However, Fedora cannot and does not ship Real Media decoders and encoders in order to serve the goal of providing and supporting only free and open source software by default.

DVD Playback

DVD playback (of CSS encrypted DVDs) may be a violation of the United States DMCA , because it may be considered circumventing a copyright protection mechanism. Additionally, MPEG2 is a patented codec, so even DVDs without encryption cannot be played.

Fedora Suggests: Using patent unrestricted formats such as Ogg Theora is highly recommended when encoding videos.

Sun's Java

Sun's Java is now under a free software license but still has some binary encumbrances which are being removed or replaced incrementally. Red Hat is working with Sun to improve free and open source Java. Fedora 9 includes OpenJDK from Sun with encumbered portions replaced by the IcedTea Project and Fedora 8 includes IcedTea too. Also Fedora includes and actively develops GCJ which can be used to run many Java programs and supports a different set of features and architectures. See the JavaFAQ for more details.

Adobe/Macromedia Flash Player

Adobe Flash Player is proprietary software. Fedora does not include proprietary software. There are open source alternatives including Swfdec and Gnash; both are available in Fedora's package repositories. If you still need to install Adobe Flash, we have Flash installation instructions.

Moonlight

There are serious concerns about Moonlight, due to Microsoft and Novell's public statements around its inclusion in their "covenant". In addition to that Groklaw has posted a FAQ from Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on the issues with this patent "covenant". Accordingly, this technology (with, or without codecs), is considered too risky, and is not acceptable for inclusion in Fedora.

TrueCrypt

The TrueCrypt software is under an extremely poor license, which is not only non-free, but actively dangerous to end users who agree to it, opening them to possible legal action even if they abide by all of the licensing terms. Fedora made extensive efforts to try to work with the TrueCrypt upstream to fix these mistakes in their license, but was unsuccessful.

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